digital emunction » Ange Mlinko

Riposte: Our Promiscuous Brains

I haven’t read the article Bobby refers to. (Monkey experiments … snore.) However, I have been reading neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain, which has much to say about the architecture of our brains and how our reading and…

Point Democracy

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a better summary of the plight of contemporary poetry than Montreal poet Michael Lista’s recent observation that “most of the so-called avant-garde poets can’t write, and most of the so-called lyric poets can’t think.”—Carmine Starnino,…

Babel vs. Lingua Franca

My latest Lingo column, Linguistic Currency, is now up on the Nation’s website. It takes off from Ferenc Karinthy’s novel Metropole, and a fascinating book on the role of English in the transformation of Slovakia into a modern European (read: free…

Miss Poem

“Miss Poem” of Hamra Street, in addition to “Jardin des poetes,” a plant nursery on the highway outside Byblos, and “Poeme,” a lingerie store near the bottom of the Chouf mountains, testify to the worldwide relevance of peignoirs, greenery, and…

A Parable on Poets’ Numbers

A widespread Muslim tradition asserts that the first to compose rajaz was the legendary ancestor of North Arabian tribes Ma’add ibn ‘Adnan, who once fell from his horse, broke his arm, and exclaimed:

yadi yadi yadi yadi

My arm, my arm, my arm,…